The Conquest of America [COMMISSION]

A commission from ToaKraka for the Conquest of America, a strange little work written in 1916 about Imperial Germany invading the United States. Kinda like Wolfenstein before there were even any Nazis in real life. It's funny how the author figures that Germany and Japan would be the great enemies in the future, because he was totally right about that. You can read the book here, and ToaKraka's summary here. This cover only has what is classified as the "realistic" portions of ToaKraka's summary, along with a Third Franco-German War that the book has. And the insane Panamanian suicide attack, but only to justify how the German invasion of America by removing the Atlantic Fleet from the equation. If you are interested in your own commission, read this post and send me a private message.

The PoD is the Germans decisively winning the Battle of Jutland, breaking out and threatening the entire British Empire. The naval-minded Wilhelm II used this victory to focus on destroying the British war effort first and foremost. Germany managed to use her u-boats to break the back of the Royal Navy after Jutland, and surprisingly managed to land troops all around the world and managed to force Britain into a corner. America never joins the Great War, the German victory convincing Americans further that entering the war is folly. The Great War drags on into 1919, with the Russians, Austrians, and French at the brink of civil war and the Germans and British exhausted. The Geneva Peace Congress of 1919 sees Germany gain Belgium and parts of the western Russian Empire, Russia trade Constantinople for Russian Armenia, the British lose bits and pieces of their empire, and France gain Alsace-Lorraine. It's the perfect compromise: you know because nobody is happy with it.

In 1921, the Germans invade America. Unlike in the book, the Americans don't win through an air war thanks to Edison and Friends. The Americans and Germans get peace, at the cost of New England, New York City and Long Island for the Americans. France declares war against Germany in 1922. Although the Germans ceded Alsace-Lorraine, they refused to allow German-speaking Alsatians to come back into Germany, and instead gave them surplus arms and all but encouraged them to rise up. The French, seeing the growth of German power, thought it was now or never to win against the Germans. They were wrong; the opportunity to win against Germany passed long ago. The Germans win the Franco-German war and, at the end of that conflict, dismantle France and turn it into a collection of puppets. Russia, still reeling from the Russian Civil War [1], did not join this second war against Germany. Germany becomes the undisputed master of Europe, but akin to Napoleon a century before, it still has enemies in the form of Britain and France.

Germany is the strongest single country in the world. Its other allies, including ostensible great powers such as Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, all play second fiddle to the Kaiser. The Germans have taken much of Africa from France and Belgium after two wars, and are profiting handsomely from the colonial exploits there. Germany has loyal buffer states to the East, Poles and Balts and Ukrainians who despise the Russians and have yet to learn to despise the Germans[2], and France is permanently broken. The German Navy is the largest in the world, she has control of ports all over the world, and the like. Wilhelm II, already extremely old, has more or less given up his power to the wartime generals, who he still thanks for saving Germany during the Great War. Prussian militarism is dominant in Germany, a necessity given the Germans' world-spanning empire.

Germany and Britain both turn de facto "socialist," but not in any sense we would generally recognize. While American detractors would call both regimes socialist, they are instead interventionist welfare states that, funnily enough, still crack down on the actual reds. Indeed, the Germans and British couch their interventionism in terms of pressure release: if they didn't do that, then the reds would rise up like they did in Russia, and then we'd *all* be in trouble.

France is a broken country. The Germans have torn it apart, seeing as giving them what they ostensibly wanted - Alsace-Lorraine - only guaranteed a future war. Even a decade after the Third Franco-German War, France remains a bloodbath.

While the British have been humiliated and cut out of the European game, they are still a global empire and very much rivals of the Germans. They have lost some parts of their empire, notably the Suez, Gibraltar, all of Ireland, and the Boer States, and the Royal Navy has been cut down, but the British are still a contender and waiting for an opportunity to rise again.

Then there is Russia. Although Russia managed to gain Constantinople[3], the Tsar was still extraordinarily unpopular after the war for all of the starvation, death, and losing large portions of the Russian Empire. Many generals despised the Tsar for giving up too soon, and the people despised him for not giving up soon enough. The Tsar abdicated, and the weak Russian government had spent much of the late 1910s-early 1920s fighting against Bolsheviks, anarchists, the Japanese and other assorted bad guys. The Russian government is as stable as a house of cards, extraordinarily corrupt, and couldn't fight its way out of a paper bag. The only thing the Left SRs and the reactionaries in the Duma can agree on is that Germany is bad, so no chance of Russia entering the German Welt-system, but they aren't much of a threat.

The Bolsheviks ran off to Sinkiang, where they are trying to spread the revolution to China. Good luck dealing with the Japanese, Leon.

Speaking of the Japanese, they gave up some of their gains in the Geneva Peace Congress in exchange for public and secret agreements with the Germans. The Japanese then spent the 1919 onward invading bits and pieces of China, taking advantage of the clusterfuck there and placing almost the entire country under de facto Japanese control. Japan has also militarized heavily, to the point that it was a threat to the Pacific Coast of the Americas by 1921. The Japanese did not invade America along with Germany, but it did invade French Indochina as the French were attacking Germany. This is the beginning of what is sure to be a profitable relationship, and with Italy abandoning the Entente and coming back into the German fold, the formation of a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis is visible on the horizon.

The Americans are seething at their defeat and have entered an age of militarization unheard of in that nation's history. They have galvanized an alliance with Germany's other great enemy, Britain, and reclamation of what the Germans call "New Germany" has become the sole mission of just about everybody in the country. This has affected politics in a way akin to Carthage's successes in Rome: Germany must be destroyed. The Anglo-American Alliance has promise, marrying the experience and breadth of Britain with the economic might of America. Both nations are eager to start another war against Germany, although unlike the French, they'll do this right.

[1] The author did not predict the Russian Civil War, but I added it in because of what we now know about Russian society at the time. Hindsight is 20/20.

[2] Except the Poles, but apart from the Baltic countries which of their neighbors don't they hate?

[3] I thought this was ridiculous and I was tempted to keep the second war with Germany in just to get rid of it, but I eventually grew to love the absurdity of it. I see it as the Germans throwing the Ottomans under the bus, with the Ottomans incapable of doing much but accepting because the Russians managed to successfully land troops there.

Wow, that's certainly ... different! Don't see many Germany invades USA scenarios in the World War I period. I'll bet the original book was written to push the message that the USA had better join the war and fight the Germans now before they got strong enough to invade the USA.

In your version, trying to hold on to New England and New York City against a militarized USA has got to be a strategic nightmare even for a very powerful Germany!

Most invasion literature of the pre-war era depicted invasions of Britain by Germany, France or some obvious stand in for one of the two. Wells was following in that tradition a little, but his important twist is that the invaders are Martians.

With the way the German Empire is so widespread and entrenched at this point, I think that America can only take back New England. I don't think there would be a Pearl Harbor attack ITTL as the Pacific Fleet is larger and prepared for a Japanese invasion. Also, pretty sure that Mexico would get the crap kicked out of them by the Texans (again) if they did join Germany for round two.

A land war against this Germany wouldn't turn out well. The only real gain Britain could hope to make would be a stalemate at sea. I think this would turn into a Cold War scenario after WWII. ITTL, it would be America and Great Britain vs. Germany and Japan. BTW, nice work!

I'll have to say that Russia losing all of its western and some of its caucasian territories yet managing to somehow gain Constantinople is... surreal. But again, so would be an imperial german invasion of North America during WWI.

There’s a reason many left Germany to begin with, and many German-Americans are ethnically German and were born in the United States. They felt more loyalty to the United States than a foreign invader.

If you were a betting man, who'd you think would win the next war. My personel thoughts is that New England will likely be taken back by the Americans as the Germans seem unable to make the population loyal to the Kaiser/German World System. Africa seems a bit more of a gamble, if the British are able to, they can take bits but I'm unsure how well the war down there will go. If the AAA can bring Russia firmly into the war, and the Anglo-American forces can get a foothold in Europe I can see the Anglo-American Alliance coming out victorious especially since the Germans seem to be exhausting themselves in France and New England.

So what is the status of Jews in Europe? Obviously, Nazism isn't a thing, but does ITTL German nationalism still see Semitic culture as "anti-German". How did the Kaiser and his goons treat millions of former Russian Jews they now govern?

So is Africa just subjected to economic exploitation, or does Germany encourage settler colonialism? Because it would be interesting to see how German culture would influence indigenous Africans.

They tend to treat Jews better than the Russians because the Jews hate the pro-Russian parts of the population and hence are reliable collaborators. This had the unfortunate effect of feeding Russian, Polish and Ukrainian anti-Semitism.

The Germans want settlers in Belgium, New Germany and the Boer States first. The rest of Africa is just for resources.